25/01/2009 by Tony Attwood.

It is not just the song “John Brown” that is a masterpiece – it is the performance that we have of it on MTV Unplugged.  Indeed because that is the only performance I have ever heard of this song, the two are utterly entwined, and the song is greatly enhanced by that performance.

There is not a note out of place, not a moment that is anything less than perfect, and Dylan gives us his message line by line, fully and ideally backed up by the band: banjo and all.

There is something about that backing which creates the smoke and flags of the battlefield, and which combines with the drive and vigor of the melody.   The chord sequence is tantalizing – the first verse clearly using only one chord, while the later verses sometimes (but not always) add the descending chord sequence of the guitar around that basic minor.

Eventually, as verse piles upon verse, we get to the final dénouement of the last two verses.  Yes, it is simple stuff, and yes we’ve heard it a million times before in a million anti-war folk songs, but never better than this.

“And I couldn’t help but think, through the thunder rolling and stink,
That I was just a puppet in a play.
And through the roar and smoke, this string is finally broke,
And a cannon ball blew my eyes away.”

As he turned away to walk, his Ma was still in shock
At seein’ the metal brace that helped him stand.
But as he turned to go, he called his mother close
And he dropped his medals down into her hand”.

Posted in MTV Unplugged (Live), The Songs | Print | No Comments »

11/01/2009 by Tony Attwood.

It doesn’t quite matter how you approach Foot of Pride, there’s something very odd about it.  According to the booklet notes it is very rarely commented upon, and one can understand why.  Apart from the fact that it never made it onto a mainstream album (it’s an outtake from Infidels, along with Blind Willy McTell) it is, well, quite plainly, odd.

Musically it is a variant 12 bar blues – but greatly extended.  In B major you get the B, B, E, B section that you’d expect, and then a chorus section with the repeated “Well there ain’t no going back” bit.

The 12 bar format, we must never forget, was created for the simplest of popular music: the blues.  It is the chordal format for “Well I woke up this morning, blues falling down like hail” – that simple yet elegant statement of falling into the abyss.  It was never intended for something as complex as Foot of Pride with its internal rhymes and lines of ever changing length.

It is probable that this is what Dylan was wanting to play with – just how far can you stretch the old 12 bar format without it breaking.  And the answer is, well, this far.  Which is a long way.

What works here is Dylan’s performance.  If he hadn’t been100% with the lyrics he’d never have got his way around them.  The band hold themselves together in the face of this torrent of words, although they do speed up slightly (shame on you Mr Knoffler).

But for what purpose?  Or is it just an experiment?

Even the opening two lines take us to another world, where the realities of our domain don’t apply.

“Like the lion tears flesh off of a man

So can a woman who passes herself off as a male”

You see my point.  It isn’t actually anything.  That’s not to say it isn’t about anything – it is beyond that.  It isn’t anything.  

The booklet that comes with the boxed set of the Bootleg 1 to 3 collection makes a decent fist of the problem, but even so…   There’s Christian religion allusions mixed up with people who are self-possessed, self-obsessed, inward looking, defensive…  But that first verse really doesn’t quite fit, and the people we are hearing about change from verse to verse without any explanation.

What it reminds me of – and it is a strange think to think about when hearing a piece of Dylan obscuranti – is the cover of Strange Days, by the Doors.  All these freaks and oddities, there for no reason.

It is a really interesting song, not least because of the quality of singing and playing, but above all if you listen to it too much, instead of insight and awareness, the only thing you are left with is madness.  When Dylan says, “I’m going to look at you, til my eyes go blind,” you want to say, “Oh if only I had thought of that.  When he says, “Your time will come, let hot iron blow as he raised the shade,” you are thinking, “I am so glad I never thought of that.”

Posted in Bootleg Series volume 3, The Songs | Print | 1 Comment »

07/01/2009 by Tony Attwood.

“Time out of mind” starts just about as low as you can imagine – “Love Sick” tells us the singer has had enough – enough not just of love, but of life.  It is the ultimate farewell song.

Except it is not, for although it is hard to imagine the album could get any lower in emotional terms Dylan does just that.  And we are asking just how sick of life has Dylan got?

“Dirt Road Blues” seems to offer some chance of respite, but then we have “Standing in the Doorway”, and amazingly we are even deeper in the emotional mire than “Love Sick”.

It is an extraordinary achievement, not just because of the lyrics, not just because of the melody, nor even the chord sequence (which unusually modulates from E major to A major) but also for the production.  Dylan’s songs, as we all know, are often rushed through, recorded with errors from the accompanying musicians allowed to stand.  (Think of the bass player on Johanna if you want one example).

But not here – this is perfection; the perfection of darkness.

Yet in contrast Dylan’s voice is soft and gentle, as if he is resigned to his fate – and indeed that is where he ultimately takes us with Not Dark Yet.

But that is three tracks away.   We start off here with very Dylan-esque commentary (“Yesterday everything was going too fast, Today, it’s moving too slow”) but then almost immediately we are shocked…

“Don’t know if I saw you, if I would kiss you or kill you
It probably wouldn’t matter to you anyhow.”

What?

Not only are the lyrics shocking, but the melody just strolls along, with the descending bass (and thank goodness for a bass player who has learned his part) and the slide guitar.  Even the drummer knows how to be laid back.

There’s no doubt that the subject matter has not changed from “Love Sick” – his lover has left…

“The ghost of our old love has not gone away
Don’t look like it will anytime soon”

And we remember that this is the man who just a few years back gave us that most amazing lovers’ line ever, “I’m going to look at you til my eyes go blind”.

We also wonder, did he kill her?

“Maybe they’ll get me and maybe they won’t” suggests that this is more of a horror than we ever imagined.  Or is going to kill himself…

“I know the mercy of God must be near, I’ve been riding the midnight train”

And…

 
“I can hear the church bells ringing in the yard I wonder who they’re ringing for”

He is trying to live on (“Last night I danced with a stranger, But she just reminded me you were the one”) but he is going nowhere.  Anyway, he’s sick of love, as we already know.

So life stops, he stops, and he prepares us for the journey towards death that Not Dark Yet foretells.   He has nothing to do, and nowhere to go – reliant on others now, not himself.  This is the end, “I see nothing to be gained by any explanation”.

And that’s it.

“You left me standing in the doorway crying
Blues wrapped around my head”

But it would be a mistake to think this is just about the lyrics.   “Standing in the doorway” is an extraordinary piece of music, brilliantly played.  What Dylan song has given us such lyricism, such gentleness, and all played against such a dreadful storyline?   Nowhere has lost love been portrayed so exquisitely.  

On its own this song is an utter masterpiece.   In the context of Time Out of Mind it is a work of genius.   For this is the song, along with Not Dark Yet, that gives us the meaning of the album’s title.

If Dylan had written nothing else, he would be worthy of a place in the hall of fame.

Posted in Time out of mind, The Songs | Print | No Comments »

24/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Amidst all the moral relativism of Dylan, all the references to the fact that “you are right on your side, and I’m all right on mine”, all the comments about not following leaders, and the commentary that says that everyone is just a pawn in everyone else’s game, suddenly like a beacon of certainty there is When the Ship Comes In.

Never has Dylan been more certain than here that there is an answer, that you are wrong and these guys (whoever they are) are right.   There is a truth, and I am part of it.

The image of the ship itself takes us back to earlier days – to the time when the British explored the new world.  Wealthy men paid for the ships to sail to the Americas, and if one ever returned then even greater wealth and fortune was yours.  Your ship came in, and you really were made for ever more.

Dylan retains the nautical imagery through the opening verse and a half, and its all a jolly caper of exploration, until we suddenly have

And the words that are used for to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they’re spoken.

The song is now so familiar to us after all these years it is hard to remember what a jolt those lines brought on first hearing.  Words getting the ship confused?   What is all this about?   Every reference until then has been to the nautical adventure.

Then he is back to talking about the ship literally, until  it is the final verse where Dylan suddenly develops this alternative theme, and takes us into a realisation that the ship is a metaphor for change.  We are the new army.  We are the revolution.  Stand aside, for we are the future.  Times they are a changing.  We are David, you are Goliath.

The trouble is we have no idea who or what we are – at least not from this song.  Are we the Jews entering the promised land?  Or the young throwing aside the President of the United States?  Are we overthrowing capitalism, or are we saying no to war and bringing in the world of peace and love.

We don’t know.  In the end it is the sheer vigour and vitality of the song and the guitar playing that carries us through so that after a couple of listens we really don’t care.   It is enough to know that somewhere there is an answer.

The classical structure of the song (every chord is one taken from the major scale – no flattened sevenths or thirds here), emphasises the straightness of the song – this is the positive side of folk singing (a total contrast to North Country Blues.)

We can join in the celebration – and indeed we should.  Because the whole wide world is watching.  Who cares if we don’t know why.  Let’s just enjoy it while we can.

Posted in Times they are a changing, No Direction Home, Bootleg Series volume 3, The Songs | Print | No Comments »

21/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

For me, to understand of Highlands, there needs to be a view of “Time out of mind”.  While many Dylan songs can stand apart from the albums on which they make the first appearance, most of Time out of Mind is fixed within the original album.

And indeed not just fixed within the album – but within a position within the album.   “Love Sick”, the opening track, sounds as if it is the end of everything – as if the singer can go no lower than where he is now.  And yet Dylan takes us down and down until the ultimate depths of “Not Dark Yet” – the song about dying.

After which there is no way but on and on, until we enter a misty no-mans-land, a vision of what is after death.  This is not heaven or hell, nor the currently popular vision of all-encompassing darkness out of which comes something appallingly awful.  This is white mist, memories, flashbacks, strange characters, and confusion of what actually happened in the past, and what you might think happened, but which might well simply be an invention.

It’s a 12 bar blues – much extended but still a 12 bar blues with meandering guitars which help us meander to the various places.

From the very start we are transported from place to place, verse by verse.  The opening verse is not one of those classics that begins “I dreamed that…” and carries on with dreaming I was back in the good times, that you were still alive, or whatever.

In the first verse the emotions of the singer are in the beautiful land and in the second he’s back in the daily grind.  So which one is true – as the third verse shows, he has no idea, and he’s really not trying to sort it out.

Verse four is back to the vision, the emotional home, and the singer knows he can make it there, but only slowly, gradually, and the methodology of transport is not yet clear.  What a transformation this is from track seven on the album where the only way forward is to enter the darkness.   He has moved on, to a world that is beyond the death of Not Dark Yet.

Verse five, and he uses the methodology that everyone who is seriously into music will use – music as a method of transportation to another world.  In this case he tries Neil Young – it doesn’t take him to the Highlands but it takes him a little along the road – although not to anywhere he recognises.

By verse six it is all getting too much, everything is breaking up, nothing is connecting, nothing is wanted, no possessions, just a search for a mental liberty, until in verse seven there is that flash of revelation just at the moment of waking – that moment where there is a beautiful insight, but as consciousness comes pouring in, it is lost, and in verse eight he’s moved on again, this time to Boston – just another image, another past moment – real or imagined.

By now the images are becoming almost dream-like – as in those dreams where nothing is quite as it should be, and you have know it is a dream, but you don’t know it enough to get out.   The conversation in the restaurant becomes surreal, all touch is being lost with the Highlands, we are getting bogged down in dream-like detail.

The next transformation back is a sudden jump – one second in the street, next back in the Highlands, but with each of these jumps there is a further disconnection from the current world and an ever stronger link with the new imagined Highland world – and he is lost.  He can’t join in the fun and games of those around him any more, because there have been too many jumps.

He recognizes the problem in the penultimate verse:

“I got new eyes, Everything looks far away”

While the end gives us the solution

There’s a way to get there, and I’ll figure it out somehow
But I’m already there in my mind, And that’s good enough for now

Posted in Time out of mind, The Songs | Print | No Comments »

17/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Here’s a simple thought: “What is Lay Lady Lay” about? There’s an oft-repeated story that when the Everly Brothers heard it they mistook it for a song about lesbians, and turned it down. That was based on a mishearing. With the lyrics printed on hundreds of Dylan web sites we can see it isn’t so… but where does the song take us?

Whatever colors you have in your mind  I’ll show them to you and you’ll see them shine

Is almost Donovan Leitch like – I am the magician I can make you see whatever you want to see.

But then who is the man whose “clothes are dirty but his hands are clean?” There’s memories of Rolling Stone here – (You used to be so amused At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used)

But no, in this case…you’re the best thing that he’s ever seen

Of course this is a softer kinder world – the harshness of Rolling Stone is not here. “Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile” is said with warmth and affection.

Contrary to all the warnings on Rolling Stone

“You can have your cake and eat it too”

Only the ending is unequivocally clear – I want to wake up next to you.

So what makes it such a wonderful song?

Certainly, if we take the warmth of the words, then it is clear that the music fits perfectly too, for it is warm and kind. But there’s more, because the chord sequence is utterly unexpected – indeed I have seen experienced hardened rock musicians who can tell you a chord sequence as they hear a song for the first time, stumble over what happens here.

A, C sharp minor, G, D

Where did that G come from? How do you get a melody to go from C sharp minor (where the top note is G sharp) to G major? Personally, I can’t think of another song that uses such a sequence.

Dylan pulls it off, and the melody glides lyrically along. Quite probably no one can ever use such a sequence again, for it is utterly Lay Lady Lay. Who cares about the lyrics this time around – it is the melody over that extraordinary chord sequence that makes it happen.

Posted in Nashville Skyline, At Boudakan, Greatest Hits Volume 2, Essential Bob Dylan, The Songs | Print | No Comments »

14/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

What is it that makes Dylan stay with Maggie’s Farm?  Hardly a tour goes by without it being wheeled out, it has been on over half a dozen albums and it was part of the notorious Newport Festival programme where the sound system produced a noise that excluded Dylan’s voice and it is actually not a very interesting piece of music.  So why do we still get given it?

Musically it’s a variant 12 bar blues with very little by way of chordal change – just one chord change from the tonic to the dominant in most versions – and even that cut out on the live version on No Direction Home.

Most commentators see this as a protest against the folk-protest movement.  While folk-protest protested against the stylized thought and life styles of straight culture, so, it is argued, Maggie’s Farm protests against the stylized thought and life style of protest culture.  Dylan is saying “I’m not going to be part of this, any more than I am going to be part of mainstream culture.”

On such an analysis the electric music makes sense in that it is essentially dull and repetitious – which the man forced to follow the views of others (or indeed working manually on the farm) might well feel.  The farm incidentally is supposedly a pun on Silas McGee’s Farm, where Dylan had performed in 1963.

So far, so good, but the problem with an uninspiring piece of music which makes the point about the fixed attitudes of both sides of the argument, is that it remains an uninspiring piece of music, no matter how many times you play it.  The singer might well have a “headful of ideas, That are drivin’ me insane” but that still doesn’t mean either that the music has to be so uninteresting, or the piece performed so often for the message to get across.

The clue as to Dylan’s attitude comes perhaps with the fact that although it is not necessarily the first song in a performance, it is an early song – a statement about what this is all about.  In that case it is a statement saying, “no ideas are fixed, we break them all down.”

Whether, “Then he fines you every time you slam the door,” actually is a note about a folk club where people are as constrained in their behaviour as in any other form of life, we’ll probably never know – but in the end that’s still not the main point.

What we actually have is a contribution to a much more interesting debate.  Pre-Electric-Dylan the “rule” was that black blues musicians played the electric guitar, but white protest musicians played the acoustic.  That was one of the strangest conventions there ever was, with strong racist as well as musical undertones.  For pointing out the absurdity of this situation, Dylan deserves all the accolades.   But maybe there could have been a better vehicle for this than Maggie’s Farm.

Well, I try my best
To be just like I am,
But everybody wants you
To be just like them.
They sing while you slave and I just get bored.
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.

Posted in Hard Rain, At Boudakan, Greatest Hits Volume 2, Bringing it all Back Home, Essential Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, The Songs | Print | No Comments »

13/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Sometimes it is a little too easy to forget just how perfect some of the early Dylan works are, and that is why the demo version of Don’t think twice is so welcome on the “No Direction Home” album. Beautifully understated, lovingly caressed, it seems the most perfect version of the song ever.

This is the start of the goodbye songs that occupied Dylan so much in the early years – “You just kind of wasted my precious time” – so much the precursor of It ain’t me babe and the other early songs of that genre.

From the instrumental introduction there is the feeling of oneness between Dylan, the song and the guitar. Through this early version you feel for him, and you even feel for the girl who is cast as the outsider – Dylan walks off with the guitar and the song, the girl has nothing save humiliation.

After all, “You’re the reason I’m travelling on” is one of the harshest lines anyone has ever sung to a woman.

It is such a perfectly simple song – the simple strophic verse-verse-verse, which makes the words become understated. Sometimes it seems that “I give her my heart but she wanted my soul” needs to be accompanied by a clash of drums, with possibly some lighting and thunder to help us along.

And this simplicity is why it can work. It is so beautifully understated. Even though “You just wasted my precious time” we have that simple chord structure and elegant melody. How could someone write such a beautiful farewell song?

Posted in No Direction Home, Freewheelin, The Songs | Print | No Comments »

09/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

In his interviews Dylan says that he wrote the Lenny Bruce song in about five minutes.   Bruce died in 1966, and Dylan wrote the song around the time of the recording of Shot of Love in 1980.  Dylan never expressed any interest in Lenny Bruce before or since, and claims he has no idea why he wrote it.

This gives us a real insight into the meaning of Dylan songs, for here, virtually by his own admission, we have a stunningly elegant piece of writing in which the words have no deep meaning, but are part of a contextual whole, equal in many regards to the melody, chords, the piano and the voice.

It works so well because the music manages to be utterly haunting, and so matches the first line (which is the only line those who remember the song actually know)

Lenny Bruce is dead but his ghost lives on and on

After that the words don’t matter too much - what matters here is the total sound.  Perform it in any other way, and a lot would be lost.

It just continues - you can put the track on and play it, and it exists there giving you a feeling about the overall sound, without any sense of the words drifting through - at least not until we get to the final line…

Lenny Bruce was bad, he was the brother that you never had.

And that is about it.  An opening line and a closing line, a piano and a voice.  All making a simple song that is haunting and exquisite.  Sometimes things just work.

Posted in Shot of Love, The Songs | Print | No Comments »

06/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

You want a masterpiece from the old boy – here it is. Unexpected, it seems to have come out of nowhere after seven years. The opening seconds present a growl of uncertainty, before the guitar clicks in, and we have no idea what is going on. And yet within seconds of the start of that opening verse, we know exactly where we are…

I’m walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping

… we are at the end. The very end. After this there is nothing. The understated vocal, the perfect backing, the accurate singing, this is the farewell performance.

“I’m sick of love but I’m in the thick of it”

It is perhaps the strangest way ever to start an album – starting with what appears to be the end. And this 1997 desolation row is far more personal than Desolation Row itself. There is no one else to blame, no Eliot and Pound fighting in the captain’s tower, because everyone else is leading an ordinary life, everyone else has a life, while the singer is just hanging on to a shadow.

So the chords of E minor and D rock back and forth, and the verse ends with a descent of E minor, D major, B minor, A major – and the descent is a descent in every respect.

It feels like the end, with the utter perfection of the accompaniment having its own understated say in the instrumental verse.

It continues, and when you think it can’t get any more painful it hits those final heart wrenching closing lines that everyone has felt. You only have to listen to Dylan’s voice on those last few notes to know the sorrow and pain.

Just don’t know what to do
I’d give anything to
Be with you

You only have to listen to the accompaniment that unexpectedly breaks up over the final B minor A major chord, before falling into the E minor to know this is the end of the end.

And yet amazingly this is not as low as it goes, because this album keeps taking us down, down and down, track after track until finally we hit Not Dark Yet, and the return journey begins into the fantasy world which ends up in Highlands. For once the track order makes some kind of sense.

This is the Vision of Johanna of the old man watching the shadows. At least in the original Visions there is the feeling that there are friends out there, and the young man singing will ultimately “get over it”. Here, there is no chance. It is downhill all the way.

Posted in Time out of mind, The Songs | Print | No Comments »